Clear

by Nicola Barker

  Silence.

  ‘I mean she didn’t even know he was Czechoslovakian. She thought he was German.’

  ‘She did,’ I eventually murmur. ‘That’s true.’

  ‘I’ll bet you fifty quid,’ Solomon continues, ‘that Jalisa knows diddly-squat about the Russian pogroms under the czar…’

  I smile, weakly.

  ‘Or the Dreyfus Case.’

  I merely shrug.

  ‘Eh?’

  I shake my head.

  (Ouch. Headache back.)

  ‘She probably thinks the Beerhall Putsch was a dispute about lager.’

  I laugh, weakly (Do Jews even drink beer?).

  ‘To prove my point,’ he says, ‘I’m gonna give you her number.’

  He pauses for a second: ‘In fact you can ring her on my phone. I haven’t deleted her digits yet.’

  He takes his phone out of his pocket, selects her number, sets it ringing and slides it across the table at me.

  ‘There you go,’ he says.

  I refuse to touch the phone.

  ‘I don’t want to speak to her now,’ I say.

  ‘Hello?’

  Jalisa answers her phone.

  ‘Solomon!’ I growl.

  ‘Hello?’

  Solomon just grins.

  ‘Hello?’

  I pick up the phone.

  ‘Jalisa,’ I say. ‘It’s Adair. I’m speaking to you on Solomon’s phone.’

  ‘Why?’ she asks.

  ‘Ask her about the Dreyfus Case,’ Solomon whispers.

  I close my eyes for a second. I open them.

  ‘Jalisa,’ I say, ‘Solomon wants you to tell me about the Dreyfus Case.’

  A short silence follows.

  ‘Oh. Okay,’ Jalisa intonates each syllable with a terrifying, clipped efficiency. ‘Tell him that Dreyfus was a Jewish officer in the late-nineteenth century French army who was scapegoated in a spying case because of his religious orientation.’

  I look over at Solomon. ‘She knows about Dreyfus,’ I say. ‘Jewish officer. French army. Scapegoated in spying case et cetera.’

  He slits his eyes.

  ‘Beerhall Putsch,’ he says.

  ‘Tell that arrogant, fat-headed little dick,’ she snaps (before I’ve even said anything), ‘that The Beerhall Putsch took place in Munich in 1923 and was Hitler’s first, unsuccessful attempt at taking power.’

  ‘She knows about the Putsch,’ I say.

  He leans across the table and snatches the phone off me.

  ‘I was right about the food,’ he hisses. ‘It transpires that Aphra has a highly developed sense of smell.’ Pause.

  ‘I said it was “aromatic”,’ he squawks. ‘I said it was “unusually aromatic”.’

  Another pause.

  ‘So what were the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?’ he asks.

  He listens for three seconds and then hangs up.

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She didn’t have a clue.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  He puts the phone down and picks up the coffee jug. He clears his throat.

  ‘So you’re telling me that Aphra actually sits on that wall every night?’ (Uh–excuse me, but am I currently the only person in my social circle with any kind of serious commitment to conversational flow?)

  ‘That’s what the security guard said.’ I shrug. ‘Sean or Saul or something…’

  ‘And after you found that out, you still wanted to shag the girl?’

  ‘I don’t believe I ever actually confessed to such an urge,’ I sniff.

  ‘Didn’t have to,’ he grimaces. ‘It’s written all over you.’

  I glance down at my torso, as if hunting for the lettering.

  ‘Tell me about the shoes,’ he says, pulling out a chair.

  ‘I thought you were disgusted by the shoes.’

  ‘I am.’

  Right.

  Fine.

  ‘Well, she actually had the shoes all lined up on her dining-room table,’ I say, ‘although she has no dining-room as such, just a corner of the lounge close to the french windows which is a designated “dining area”. But the lounge is big and there’s plenty of room…’

  ‘Could you sketch me out a floor plan?’ Solomon asks (the bitch).

  ‘Anyway,’ I stagger manfully on, ‘attached to each pair of shoes–and there must’ve been about fifty or so–was a small, handwritten tag, and printed on to each tag was a list of information particular to that pair–where they were bought–’

  ‘But why were the shoes on the table?’ he butts in.

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask.’

  ‘You didn’t ask?’

  I roll my eyes. ‘Do you actually want me to get to the part when we have terrible sex or not?’

  ‘Shoes on the fucking table,’ Solomon mutters.

  (Yeah. He wants the sex part real bad.)

  ‘All the shoes were antique. And even I could tell that it was a pretty amazing collection…’

  ‘What do you mean, “even I could tell…”,’ Solomon scoffs. ‘You’re shoe obsessed.’

  ‘I am not.’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘I am not.’

  ‘Well, you’re the only person I’ve ever met,’ he snipes, ‘who conducts formal burial services for their worn-out trainers.’

  ‘So I have an affection for Chuck Taylor,’ I snap. ‘What of it?’

  Silence.

  ‘She actually had a couple of pairs,’ I continue (rather sullenly), ‘from the seventeenth century. French. Absolutely exquisite. Said she only ever wore them inside.’

  ‘People had smaller feet back then,’ Solomon opines.

  ‘Yeah. The shoes were minute. All hand stitched. But Aphra has tiny feet. Size four. So they fit.’

  ‘How tall is she?’

  ‘Uh…five two? Three?’

  ‘I have this image in my mind now,’ he mutters, ‘of a girl like a tent peg.’

  ‘The feet aren’t too small,’ I leap to her defence. ‘Not at all. They’re fine. In fact they’re…they’re nice.’

  Solomon merely grunts.

  ‘They are. I saw them. Soft skin. Neat little toes. Finely arched. She actually tried on several pairs for me while I was just sitting there…’

  ‘Which shoes did you fuck her in?’

  (Does this man have no concept of foreplay?)

  ‘On each tag,’ I persist, ‘is a brief description of where she bought the shoes, how much she paid, and a detailed analysis of the previous person who owned them.’

  ‘Wah?’

  Solomon does a couple of gay blinks.

  ‘Yeah. See? Now you’re interested, eh?’

  ‘Is her nose that good?’

  I nod.

  He leans back in his chair. ‘I’ve actually heard about people like that before,’ he says.

  ‘Bullshit you have.’

  He shrugs.

  ‘She had this pair of pale-pink pigskin boots from the nineteen-fifties–pearl buttons all up the sides–which stretched halfway to her thighs.’

  ‘You know what?’ Solomon shakes his head. ‘Not only is that historically improbable, but it’s physically unappealing. Is she blonde?’

  ‘Brunette.’

  ‘Even so. The insipid pink of the boot, coupled with all those dimpling acres of pale, white thigh flesh.’

  ‘Fantastic,’ I gasp.

  ‘Repugnant,’ he shudders.

  We face a brief impasse.

  ‘You owe me fifty quid,’ I mutter (piqued for Aphra’s thighs), ‘Jalisa knew about the Putsch.’

  ‘True,’ Solomon concedes, and pulls his wallet from his pocket. As he opens it up and removes the notes (his gambling credentials are always impeccable–he’d rather eviscerate a small poodle than welsh on a bet) I spin his phone around and access his address book. Good.

  ‘So who owned them, then?’ he asks, pushing the notes over.

  I glance up, guilt
ily. ‘A Frenchman. Very small. Had corns. Probably a dancer. Addicted to painkillers.’

  ‘And did she try them on while you were there?’

  ‘No.’

  (This is a lie.)

  ‘Did you listen to any music?’

  I squirm in my seat slightly.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘She has no music. She doesn’t listen to music. I only saw an old portable radio / cassette player and two tapes. The Best of Joan Armatrading and The Best of Abba.’

  ‘Only the best of everything for this filly, eh?’ Solomon chortles. ‘So a big Fuck-Off TV, maybe?’

  ‘Nothing fancy,’ I mutter, ‘and the TV was bust. Anyway, she claimed she “didn’t have time” for TV.’

  ‘Books?’

  I clear my throat, anxiously. ‘Loads of cook-books. A Life on Earth hardback from the TV series…’

  ‘Which she presumably didn’t actually see,’ Solomon murmurs.

  ‘And a dictionary. Collins.’

  ‘Man, she’d better fuck like a hell-hound,’ Solomon observes soberly, ‘because By Christ this girl’s an immortal philistine.’

  I merely shrug.

  ‘I mean what did you talk about all night?’

  I shrug again. ‘Stuff.’

  ‘What stuff?’

  ‘Her shoes. The weather. I don’t remember.’

  Solomon frowns at me.

  ‘You’re not actually going to spill, are you?’

  I blow my nose, poignantly.

  ‘I can see it in your face. You’re feeling guilty. You’re already developing some kind of pointless crush on this aspirant, star-fucking shoe-fiend. In fact you’re planning a fantasy mixed-music cassette tape for her, probably themed, even as I speak…’

  My eyes widen, in shock (and hurt), as he snatches up his phone and marches off to his meeting.

  Then I grab a stray pencil and chew ferociously on its tip.

  Okay. Right. Track Three…

  Something really mellow.

  Roy Ayers, ‘Everybody Loves The Sunshine’.

  Bingo.

  Then something jazzy–to show my emotional depth and range–but nothing too scary…

  Ray Charles, ‘Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying’.

  Followed by something really poppy (What? Adair Graham MacKenny taking himself too seriously? Not on your bloody nelly). ‘Who Loves The Sun’. Velvet Underground.

  And I’ll call it Aphra’s Autumnal Groové cassette.

  (‘Twenty-four songs about the sun.’)

  No. On second thoughts, skip the bit in parentheses.

  Can’t be too obvious.

  Ten

  She prepares me a cup of White Tea in her tiny kitchen. I stand in the open doorway with a thumping headache and my sinuses prickling.

  ‘Made from the newest leaves on the plant,’ she whispers, ‘which the Chinese reserve for their most sacred tea ceremonies…’

  She inhales the aroma, ecstatically, her eyes tight shut, then opens them and registers my jaded expression. ‘Pearls before swine,’ she mutters, passing it over (This girl is the last word in hospitality, eh?) before hunting around in a wall unit and producing a bottle of 10-year-old single malt (from one of the more brutish of the Scottish islands), unscrewing the lid and drinking a nip from the cap.

  (By the way that she winces I deduce that it has a kick to it like a bad gear-change on a Kawasaki 500.)

  Perhaps it’s my blocked-up nose, but the tea is incredibly bland (Sacred? My arse). And (can this be just a coincidence?) she hasn’t poured herself a cup.

  We tip-toe through to the living room. She shows me her shoes laid out on the dining-room table. There are dozens of others, too, packed neatly into a large, cardboard box. I pull out the pink, pigskin boots and inspect them.

  ‘Never worn the things,’ she whispers so quietly that I have to move closer to hear her. ‘Never worn them,’ she repeats and I feel the warmth of her whisky-breath on my ear.

  She steps back, yanking off her left pixie atrocity and pulling the boot on to her foot (simply leaving the pigskin to flap). ‘They were handmade in the nineteen fifties,’ she explains, ‘owned by a Frenchman, a showman. Maybe an actor. He was addicted to painkillers. Smell that…’

  She offers me the second boot to sniff.

  I point to my nose. ‘Blocked.’

  ‘Ah.’

  She lounges against the arm of the sofa, holding her pigskinned foot out mournfully in front of her. ‘There must be over two hundred tiny pearl buttons.’

  ‘Gotta see them done up,’ I say, crouching down and taking a hold of her foot. She promptly collapses–with a gurgle–backwards over the arm (almost kicking me in the face) so all that’s now visible from my low angle is her shin and her knee and the boot.

  ‘Loads of people bringing along their American flags this weekend,’ she murmurs up towards the ceiling, yawning, ‘but on Friday he’d scrawled this message on to the back of the box.’

  I glance up from the boot. ‘How’d he do that?’

  (Second button, third.)

  ‘I’m not sure. Maybe just in the condensation. I heard someone saying he must’ve used his lip salve, but I’m not sure he did…’

  ‘And what did it say?’

  (Fourth–a little tight.)

  ‘I can’t remember exactly, but something about how he didn’t consider himself to be a member of any particular nation or creed, and that what he was doing was meant to be a demonstration of the strength of the human spirit and how he hoped it would give courage to others.’

  (Fifth button–my eyes are watering–I sneeze, hugely–sixth, seventh.)

  ‘Bless you.’

  Another yawn.

  ‘But he was really proud of it. Kept retouching it all day, standing on his knees. It gave him something positive to focus on.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yup.’

  She burps.

  ‘Sorry. And there was a really noisy woman wrapped up in this huge American flag at one point. She was marching around the compound, waving her arms about, offering support. But he just kept turning and pointing at the message he’d written. I think he was touched by her enthusiasm, but irritated by her patriotism.’

  (Twelfth button. Thirteenth is missing.)

  ‘Your thirteenth button is missing.’

  ‘I know. There’s this beautiful blonde woman who comes to see him most nights before he goes to sleep…’

  ‘That’ll be Manon. His girlfriend. She’s German. She’s apparently staying in one of the caravans in the car park.’

  ‘She’s stunning.’

  ‘A model.’

  ‘Yeah. Well whatever she is, she must be incredibly patient.’

  ‘You’re not wrong there.’

  ‘I mean how could you do that to yourself? If you loved someone?’

  ‘Live in a car park?’

  ‘Starve yourself. Hurt yourself, and expect them to watch on.’

  ‘His mother died when he was twenty-one,’ I mutter, ‘after a terrible illness, and his father–so far as I’m aware–died when he was young. Perhaps it’s vengeance. Or perhaps that’s precisely how he understands love. Perhaps–for him–the journey of love is in suffering.’

  (Twenty-fifth.)

  She pokes out her head, to peer at me round the arm, ‘That’s deep.’

  She grins.

  ‘The question is,’ I muse, ‘how long any woman could retain her sense of self-worth in the face of these self-destructive acts. You won’t’ve seen the film they made when he packed himself in ice…’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Incredibly disturbing.’

  She pokes her head out again. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. The stunt’s underway. He’s trapped inside this massive ice-block. There are hundreds of people standing there watching. He’s unbelievably cold. He’s maybe fifty-odd hours in, and he starts to hallucinate. He’s basically going into shock.’

  I feel her leg stiffen.

>   ‘Doesn’t anyone try and help him?’

  ‘They can’t. He has some kind of release sign–or release word–and he hasn’t used it yet.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Yeah. Anyway, things are all getting a little strange when suddenly his girlfriend arrives. She’s come to see him.’

  ‘A different girlfriend?’

  ‘That’s exactly my point…’

  (Thirty-fourth–I suck on my thumb for a minute.)

  ‘…Man, these things are pesky. They’re tight and sharp.’

  ‘So what happens?’

  When I finish sucking my thumb I readjust the boots on her legs, then can’t stop myself from stretching out my hand and slipping it along the soft skin inside her knee. In automatic response, her knee jerks straight and she kicks me, squarely, on the chin.

  So that taught me, then.

  ‘Ow.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Anyhow…’ The buttoning recommences. ‘The girlfriend is this famous actress. Can’t remember her name. Tall, brunette, very beautiful–but she looks absolutely fucking desperate. I mean maybe I read too much into it at the time, but my feeling was definitely that she didn’t like the idea of this stunt, that she was pissed off, that she utterly resented being made to parade in front of the public like that, having her fear, her grief, made a part of the drama…’

  ‘Tough call.’

  ‘Exactly. Anyway, she walks up to the front of the ice-block and glances in at him. Her expression is not compassionate, but more–kind of–blank. Then she walks off.’

  ‘And what’s he doing?’

  (She’s trying to sit up, but I have her leg held too tight.)

  ‘That’s the tragic part. When he sees her walking away he goes absolutely bloody ape-shit. Frantic. Becomes unbelievably distressed. Is crying, hitting the ice…It’s incredibly claustrophobic to watch.’

  ‘My God.’

  ‘I know. And his team fly into a panic. They can see that he’s losing it. So they suddenly start trying to cut him out.’

  ‘How long does it take?’

  ‘Too long. A good while. They have to hack into this huge ice-block with an axe or a chain-saw (I can’t remember which) and Blaine, meanwhile, has almost come back to himself, and he’s shouting at them–gesticulating wildly–but it’s impossible to tell if it’s because he does or he doesn’t want to leave the block…’